See these links—they contain lots of explanation about this:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Totally off-topic but I'm noticing that these comments load reasonably quickly without any paging. I remember some popular topics in the past had problems loading even after the number of comments per page was limited. Don't know who deserves it but wanted to offer kudos for the optimization work!

thanks! more info at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41679215

There's been a recent-ish (past 2-3 months?) site update which bypasses that problem, though I cannot find dang's comment announcing that.

Impact?

a ban on newly created anon and throwaways would slow these threads down. Also, too many Elon fanbois.